Since this seems to be the only community for distilling, I'll try and see if we can get some content going here. I've had this still as a pot still only for the last eight years. Decided I wanted to do some column distilling, so asked a welder friend to do some adjustments to the boiler head. He added two tri-clamps for me, one facing up for a column, one facing sideways for pot distilling.

Last weekend I cleaned it for a final time (rinsed it in phosphoric acid), and yesterday ran the first batch. Started with 5 liters of 40-ish % alcohol mixed with 4 liters of water, ended up with 1,75 liters of 93 % alcohol. It was actually a bit more, but the final 0,25 liters were of lower alcohol content so I put them in the feints yar.

All in all I really liked running it like this. I wanted to make it a bokakob style column at first, but decided to make it a VM because I didn't have all the parts for the slanted plate section. I might make this part later, but so far I'm quite impressed by the performance of the VM setup. I also loved the fact that it shuts down production by itself, as soon as the alcohol is gone from the wash, the yield slows down to a few drips.

Not sure this community is alive, but gotta ask for you guys that are experienced.

At some time ago I'd tried really good whisky. Really really good, I mean, Lagavulling 18 kind good. I didn't really care for whisky before trying that.

Now a days I'm a big fan of those whiskies, but they are extremely expensive where I live. I'm talking about a month earnings worth.

My question here is: Is it possible to distill that grade of good whisky at home? How close one can get to those whiskies home distilling?

Thanks guys, hope someone sees this and answer.

I know this community is probably dead but what the hell.

Rum spirit run. Why am I using a reflux column for rum, shouldn't it be pot stilled?

Yes, yes it should be. However I'm using the reflux condenser to just introduce a small amount of reflux to help compress the heads / tails, nowhere near the same amount of reflux as if I was trying to make neutral spirit.

Anyway it works, the spirit coming off is much "prettier" and less offensive than it would have been running in pot mode, while still retaining flavours from the molasses

Tried making some pure sugar mash last year and it turned out laughable. Thinking about trying my hand at potato mash. Does anyone have any recommendations for recipes or tips?

Hello fellow distillers and potential ex-reddit users. This is the new space on Lemmy for all things distilling!

Hopefully we can grow the community and learn this new Lemmy thing together.

The space is looking pretty bare, but with some help, it'll be home in no time. Here's a pick of my setup to make it look less bare. It's a reflux still from AliExpress sitting on top of a grainfather. The needle valves that it came with are rubbish and need replacing, as I can't close the reflux condenser all the way anymore. Regardless of its flaws I still love it and it can produce some tasty (tasteless) vodka.